SOURCE: "Thomas McGuane: The Novel of Manners Radicalized," in Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, pp. 104-115.

In the following essay, Klinkowitz discusses McGuane's fiction as "the new American novel of manners." He maintains that McGuane has the ability to single out the characteristics of an age and know his characters through them.

A tea biscuit crumbles, and in its fragments Henry James can read the fortunes of a social world. "Her voice sounded like money," Nick Carraway says of Daisy Buchanan, and in that manneristic notation we sense the compelling illusion of Gatsby's life. There's even a touch of it in Faulkner: young Thomas Sutpen is turned away by a servant at the rich man's door and forever vows to build himself an equal domain. Despite our relative incivility and egalitarian beliefs, who says there is no novel of...